Tripadvisor

Nice office.

Friday lunch.

Yes, Viator Sydney used to be a great place till Vacation Rentals stepped in. Tripadvisor Experiences (Viator) got a new CEO from Vacation Rentals, and he brought his team with him. Obvious, isn’t it?

Quite a few higher management relocated to Sydney and took powers into their hands. From then on, it's all favouritism and politics.

Favouritism over Skill:

Managers would never give a chance to the deserving team or the individual; rather, they will give it to their favourites. Always, the favourites will get a chance to work on the greenfield projects and to move around new projects and the tech stack, while others need to fix their defects and support the legacy systems.

Lack of Trust:

Difference in opinion is not at all acceptable. Even if you have one, it’s better not to raise it. You will get into their bad books. Forget about quality or maintenance; release it ASAP. If you say no, you will be tagged as a slow performer.

A culture of looking at how many commits you have done in a day/month, how much time you take to deliver a feature, is always at the back of your shoulder. This data could have been used constructively, but rather, they used it to create an unsafe work culture. You have to be an exhibitionist to thrive, but the team work was getting destroyed with this culture. I had multiple discussions with the management regarding this, but the efforts were futile.

Time spent on pool and table tennis will be monitored (not officially, though). They would ask us to limit our play time when the US counterparts visit. (An earlier Glassdoor review on the same was removed :))

Lack of Freedom:

Top management has strong choices for the tech stack to be used in the projects across the company. There is no question of the right tool for the right job. For instance, the Spring framework is not favoured because some team/team members didn’t understand it. Why on earth, would you write your own transaction management and maintain it? You need to fight hard to justify that the tool you chose is the right one; at the end of the day, it will be rejected, and you would be tagged as a rebel.

Please don't reply that you are open to discuss, as all our discussions were futile.